In the 1930s and 1940s the Jews of Montreal were living a nightmare. Most were recent immigrants who had fled Eastern Europe because of violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism in their home countries. Montreal, then home to Canada’s largest Jewish community, did offer Jews a relatively safe haven but the telltale signs of hatred still abound.

It was not uncommon to see “No Jews No Dogs” signs at beaches and private clubs in Quebec.

Jewish sports clubs were often taunted with shouts of “dirty Jew” in French and English.

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Quebec politicians and newspapers raised alarms of having too many Jews in their midst that found a strong reception in the overwhelmingly Christian population. At the same time, the Nazis had taken control in Germany and Jew-hatred rose to new heights throughout the rest of Europe.

Canadian Jews were caught in a dilemma, said Max Beer, a Montreal scholar and the son of Holocaust survivors, who spoke at a conference on the humanities in Kitchener-Waterloo this week.

The order of the day was “don’t rock the boat.”

If Jews were too strident about the growing danger to their co-religionists in Europe, they feared unwelcome attention at home and triggering even worse forms of anti-Semitism, Mr. Beer explained.

“There was a fear that resonated through most of the [Canadian Jewish] leadership that any emphasis on the genocide of the Jews would cause public opinion to look at Canadian Jews as being interested solely in Jewish problems,” Mr. Beer wrote in his paper, Holocaust Survivors and the Montreal Jewish Community.

“Any time Jews had a rally they made sure most of the people in the front row were non-Jews,” said Mr. Beer in an interview. “Everything had to be presented from a non-Jewish point of view. They had to make it appear that it was a universal cause. The message was that everyone was the victim of Hitler.”

Mr. Beer’s paper looks at why those few lucky Jews who did manage to survive the war and make their way to Canada were often met with indifference by fellow Jews.

“I wanted to know why the arrival of survivors to Canada after the war rarely was the subject of discussion of the local Jewish community,” said Mr. Beer, who works with the oral history department at Concordia University in Montreal, recording the stories of Holocaust survivors.

Jews in Montreal had been so conditioned from circumstances in the 1930s and during the war years to try to remain invisible that it took years to shake off their fear, even once Nazism was defeated.

“At the end of the war, the Jews of Montreal were in a state of trauma,” Mr. Beer said.

Not only were they traumatized by their own experience but were also burdened by the extra guilt of having to be quiet while fellow Jews in Europe were being slaughtered by the millions.

Mr. Beer said it is impossible to judge the experience of Montreal Jews from the lens of today’s multicultural society. Jews in Montreal had genuine reasons to believe that their situation could deteriorate.

In the 1930s, one newspaper wrote that the Jews in Germany were getting what they deserved and “a similar fate awaited them in Quebec.”

“What is happening in the new Germany is germinating everywhere where Jews are considered as intruders,” the article continued. “And where, one may well ask, are they considered otherwise.”

Even in 1943, with Canada already in its fourth year of war against Germany, with reports of mass killings already leaking out of Europe and Canadian soldiers dying in battle, Maurice Duplessis, leader of the Union Nationale party, alleged that his Liberal opponents were being secretly funded by a “International Zionist Brotherhood” in exchange for allowing 100,000 Jews to settle in Quebec, Mr. Beer explained.

The anti-Semitic canard worked and Duplessis was elected premier.

Still, Jews kept mainly silent, he said, because there were already accusations in Quebec that the war was really a “Jewish war” started by Jews for the benefit of Jews.

The Canadian Jewish Congress did work diligently behind the scenes to gain political support for Europe’s Jews during the war, said Mr. Beer, while at the same time scouring the displaced persons camp after the war for Jewish refugees whose skills could be a ticket to an immigration ticket.

But these activist Jews were well established and more secure in their position. Like the Bronfmans, they were wealthy and powerful and not without some political influence. They were more “Canadian” than their recent-immigrant cousins, as many families could trace their Canadian heritage back to the early 1800s and even before. And so the vast majority of Jews of the lower caste took their cue from the community’s leaders – and that cue was to keep their heads down and to not draw attention to the community, said Mr. Beer.

In mid-1943 a Gallup poll asked Canadian to list the group that would be the most undesirable as immigrants. Jews were listed third after Japanese and Germans. A year after the war ended, Gallup found that Jews were the second most undesirable group, after Japanese.

Some Jewish survivors who made it to Canada after the war wanted to leave their identities behind so they could blend into the greater Gentile world. Other survivors could not talk about their experience.
And many refugees found the complaints of Canadian Jews trite.

“Many survivors were said that they were admonished by locals who told them that things were pretty bad in Canada, with rations of meat and sugar,” wrote Mr. Beer. “As one survivor, commenting on those remarks, said sarcastically, ‘No sugar, can you imagine that?’ ”

Worse, there were Canadian Jews, as well as many Christians, who would not accept that such horrors had taken place.
“Even with numerous newsreels and photo essays from Europe following the defeat of Nazism, information on the Holocaust remained scant,” he wrote. “While people were able to see horrific footage of both the dead and barely-alive remnants of the camps, the victims remained nameless. They were often referred to as ‘innocent civilians’ or ‘victims of Nazism,’ but the fact that many were Jews was not mentioned.”